GOP taking stock after defeats

Party's grip in Ariz. solid, but Dems make small gains

As President Barack Obama picked up swing state after swing state Tuesday in his re-electon victory, down-ticket candidates also picked up key seats, enabling Democrats to expand their control over the U.S. Senate. Three states passed ballot measures supporting gay-marriage -- a key plank of the Democratic platform -- and a fourth rejected a measure that would have banned it.

Nationally, Republicans and conservatives have started soul-searching and rebuilding in the wake of the electoral shellacking.

But in Arizona on Tuesday, voters statewide saw red for the most part, backing Republican nominee Mitt Romney for president, narrowly supporting GOP Rep. Jeff Flake for the state's open U.S. Senate seat and electing a slate of Republicans to the Arizona Corporation Commission. Voters also defeated ballot measures that would have extended an education tax and scrapped the state's partisan primary system. And in Maricopa County, voters returned controversial Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio to office for a sixth term.

Arizona Republicans did see some setbacks: The party still controls both chambers of the state Legislature, but with smaller numbers and no more supermajority in the state Senate. And it's possible that Democrats could hold five of the state's nine congressional seats, depending on how three too-close-to-call races turn out.

Election results, however, suggest this may have as much to do with redistricting as any shift in voters' mood.

In all, Arizona maintained its reputation as a red state in a presidential year, despite considerable chatter and speculation that Obama and Democratic Senate candidate Richard Carmona would put it in play.

"It's been my opinion that Arizona has always been kind of against the grain when it comes to national politics," said Van Ornelas, a Phoenix-based Democratic political consultant and strategist.

While some Arizona Republicans say the results confirm that Arizona is a right-of-center state, other political observers say seismic demographic shifts -- most notably the rising influence of Latino voters, who were crucial to Obama's win -- are under way in Arizona and it's just a matter of time before the state turns purple or blue unless the GOP finds a way to make better inroads with Hispanics. It didn't happen in 2012, but it could happen in 2016 or 2020, said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races for the nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based "Cook Political Report."

"I think Arizona behaved the way it usually does," Duffy said. "It's not quite there yet. It's a state that you're going to hear Democrats talk about, but it's going to be a while before it actually flips."

As of Friday, unofficial results showed Republican candidates won 52.8 percent of the statewide votes in congressional races. Two years ago, Republicans won 53.0 percent of the votes.

Libertarians siphoned enough votes, typically at the expense of GOP candidates, that they may have allowed Democrats to eke out victories in two of the three competitive races this year.

In state legislative races, Democrats won more seats than two years ago. But, again, their share of votes statewide showed only modest gains.

All Democrats in state Senate races went from 40.1 percent of the votes in 2010 to 41.5 percent as of Friday. In the House, Democrats climbed from 35.7 percent of the votes to 39.9 percent.

In the short term, Arizona has some built-in advantages that aid the GOP. Republicans have a voter-registration edge, and independents outnumber Democrats. Labor unions, which traditionally support Democrats, don't have nearly the influence in Arizona that they do in other states, including nearby Nevada, which Obama carried on Tuesday. Arizona also traditionally has had a libertarian streak as exemplified by the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.

Nationally, exit polling showed that Romney won with voters over the age of 30, doing especially well with voters who were 65 and older. Romney won the senior demographic on Tuesday 56 percent to 44 percent. However, Obama won 60 percent of voters who are 30 or younger. The racial divide also was striking: 93 percent of Black voters and 71 percent of Latino voters backed Obama, while 56 percent of White voters backed Romney.

"The Republican Party really was revealed to be an old, White, male, elite group of people, and that's absolutely the opposite direction of where this country is going," said Bruce Merrill, a veteran Arizona political scientist and pollster and a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy. "So why did Arizona maybe go against some of the trends in some of the other states? Well, guess what, Arizona even has more of the older White males because of the migration into the retirement communities."

Nationally, Republicans immediately conceded that the wholesale rejection of Romney by Latino voters is a big problem and that the long-stalled issue of comprehensive immigration reform is likely back on the table for the next Congress.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Romney's loss means Republicans need to attract younger candidates for office and reassess their relationship with Hispanic voters. McCain, a one-time champion of reforms such as a guest-worker program and a path to legal status for illegal immigrants already in the country, said immigration reform likely will be revisited. The GOP also needs to emphasize to Latinos shared values, such as support for small business, lower taxes and the military, he said.

"Whenever you suffer a defeat, you have to regroup and go back into the fight," McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, told The Arizona Republic.

McCain saw some positive things for the Democrats in Tuesday's Arizona results.

"When you dig into some of the numbers, Democrats made some gains here, in the Legislature," McCain said. "We'll see how these close congressional races come out. But I don't think there's any doubt that there's a viable Democrat Party in our state."

Voters changing

Fred Solop, a professor of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University, said some of the talk about Obama possibly competing this year in Arizona and putting the state in play was hype, or perhaps wishful thinking on the part of some Democrats. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to carry Arizona in a presidential election since President Harry Truman won the state in 1948. Still, Solop agreed that the rise of the Latino voting bloc eventually will help change the state's complexion.

"The country is changing: The demographics of the country are changing and the attitudes in the country are changing, and those same dynamics are at play here in Arizona," Solop said.

About 18 percent of Arizona voters on Tuesday were Latino, according to exit polling.

However, Ornelas, the Democratic strategist, said he was disappointed that Latinos didn't make a greater impact in Arizona on Tuesday. Many were energized by the candidacy of Carmona, who would have been Arizona's first Hispanic U.S. senator; the race to oust anti-illegal-immigration hawk Arpaio; and issues such as the Dream Act.

He also said he believes the Obama campaign was sincere when it initially signaled that it would fight for Arizona this year. "I think they had high hopes to really change the state," Ornelas said.

Arizona was not alone in maintaining its relatively stable conservative leanings.

The GOP gained a 30th gubernatorial position nationwide after North Carolina elected a Republican on Tuesday. That state, along with Indiana, dropped from Obama's electoral column this year.

Texas hasn't elected a Democrat in a statewide race since 1994, and the GOP largely continued its dominance on Tuesday.

Of 36 Texas congressional seats, 24 went to Republicans. Democrats, however, won three of the state's four additional seats this year.

With the partisan stalemate continuing, the familiar battles over nearly everything in Washington are unlikely to change, political observers say.

Republicans "would simply discount the election. It proves nothing as far as they're concerned," said Morris Fiorini, a political-science professor at Stanford University. "If you liked gridlock last time, and a lot of people did, you should be real happy the next two years."

Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, has studied decades of voting history to chart the historical polarization of Washington. After Tuesday, he noted that "the ideological center continues to hollow out" of the Senate.

"The polarization shows no sign of letup," he said.

Ann Kirkpatrick, the Democrat who appears to be narrowly winning back the congressional seat she lost in 2010, said after Tuesday that she isn't changing her legislative priorities.

"No, because I have been in this district my entire life," she said. "I know the issues. It really is economic development and jobs. That's what I ran on, and that's our plan to continue to work on that."